"keith laid there, feeling particularly victorious. the girl in front of him was a suitor of many, and who should be so lucky as to land angie dupont?"
-
prequel to dead flowers
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
head of j.d's mustang.
Unfit partners were everywhere in the world, in every country and every place. Like the truth or ignorance, you could always find them if you looked hard enough. They invaded our schools and workplaces and flooded the streets. They filled our homes and took up apartments. And, of course, they took up the town of Georgia.
Jack Hansen was a Texan hero around the place and fit the bill to the T, with his top lip protected by an unnaturally thick moustache that quivered when he laughed. In high school, everybody had nicknamed the star quarterback 'J.D' after the Jack Daniels that fit his hand at every party or gathering. Now, he wasn't in high school anymore, but the Jack Daniels hadn't quite left his hands.
Julie Young wasn't Texan, or even foreign. She didn't have an alcohol-affiliated nickname, or a nickname in general. She was just Julie Young, that girl with the black hair who vacated crowded dance floors to stand in the corners and wasn't even a runner-up for prom queen. She was born in Georgia, and there she would stay, but she didn't know that yet.
So, it was a rare day, a cause for attention when Mr. J.D Jack Hansen came strolling into the Young family's grocery store with a swagger that told everybody he knew that he was better. "I heard you guys were sellin' Marlboros on sale?" Julie wondered, briefly, if the grittiness of his accent, like sand caught between your teeth, was natural or not before nodding her head wordlessly.
"What," His strong hands, weathered from use, flexed as he leant forward and gripped the counter's edge, "Cat caught your tongue, beautiful?" He gave a smile, like Paul Newman with long hair. Julie scolded herself for not knowing whether this constituted as flirting, but blushed as she reached for his cigarettes all the same.
"Ah." Jack said, loudly, like her actions had told him all he wanted to know. As she passed him his change, he gripped her hand and swiftly kissed the back of it. Standing up, he winked and said, "See ya later, pretty lady."
So they found excuses. Jack needed more cigarettes. Or milk or eggs. Newspaper, bread, apples, stamps, postcards. And Julie wanted to cover more shifts, just to work. Just to see him; just to see each other.
Tiny grains of rice dug themselves into Julie's knees as she knelt some days later, holding the bible and whimpering uselessly in hopes to provoke some type of sympathy from her father. One of Julie's sisters, Sandra, had tattle-tailed to her father, saying she saw Julie kissing a boy behind the school. Now, she suffered for it, by the hands of her religious father and her pretentious, image-conscious stepmother.
"Was the kiss worth it?" Her father shouted, spit flying from his mouth. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her sister, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, peeking in from the doorway. Poor Cynthia was only six, and was coming to the harsh realization of what was to come as she grew older. She watched as her step-mother shooed Cynthia away, growing with distaste.
That night, as Julie's other sister Rebecca brushed her tangled hair and added Vasline to her scraped knees, Julie began to cry for no good reason other than her heart was heavy with hate. Rebecca did not do much other than kiss her head, then continue patching up her knees. Dissatisfied and bitter, Julie pushed her hands away, "Why are you not upset that they do these types of things to us?"
Rebecca did a shuddering sigh, as though tired of the question already. Rebecca was a year older than Julie, though held herself like she was an adult; she was the oldest out of all the Young siblings, and had always acted like she was an adult, more mature than them all, "Can't you see how upset I am? It upsets me constantly, but I try not to waste time on it."
Julie scowled, annoyed at her maturity, "Well, aren't you going to do something about it?"
"Yes, I am," Rebecca replied, "I plan it everyday. Once I get out and get stable, I'm coming back and getting custody of Cynthia so she won't have to go through the same stuff we did." Julie's eyes widened as Rebecca flicked the light off, climbing under the sheets of her twin bed across from Julie's as if she had been discussing the weather.
"He'll kill you." Julie muttered, feeling little and small. Rebecca rolled onto her side to face her as Julie did the same, tracing each other's features in the blue of the moon that poked through their window, "Then let me die. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I stood by, doing nothing to help."
"How stupidly heroic of you." Julie mocked, wishing she was brave like Rebecca.
She reminisced on all this as she looked through pictures on the one year anniversary of Rebecca's death, searching for a better word to use than 'anniversary' but coming up with nothing. She had never been a particularly bright girl, but wished she was.
Her stomach, plump with a baby of three months, was hard to spot as her figure had grown more and more slight while being with Jack. She cradled it, still, as she moved to sit beside him, attempting to understand the work he was fulfilling with his father.
Jack's father, a pudgy man whose mustache was tinted with grey, looked up from the table and then to Jack, "Send the woman out, this is a man's job." Julie opened her mouth to correct him, tell him once again of her name, but one glare from Jack had her shutting it and shuffling from the room.
Sitting in the living room, she cradled her knees and looked around, trying to find herself a place in Jack's world. She tried not to think of Rebecca, or Sandra, and especially not Cynthia, who always found a place in her mind whenever Julie was left alone, which was frequent. Cynthia would be nine now, deemed old enough for 'proper' punishment; Julie squeezed her eyes shut and tried to forget the first time her dad had ever touched her like that. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to forget the fact that Rebecca's promise was now mute, and Cynthia was still under her father and stepmother's care, and the fact that Julie was too weak, too small, too under Jack's thumb to do a thing about it. Squeezing her eyes shut and trying to forget that she and Jack had joined the rank of unfit partners everywhere.
- i really, really, really encourage you guys to read "dead flowers". it might help you understand the flipping of this book a little better.
